Nomination To Eu Fails To Curb Turkey

Abuses Still Prevalent, Activists Say

ISTANBUL — Her name is Sevgi Ince and she wears a sweater embroidered with a cartoon of an impish puppy. She is 19 years old, stands barely 5 feet tall and walks with the aid of two metal crutches.

She has spent four years in Turkish prisons without being told what her crime was. She may have signed a confession, but she's not sure. She was blindfolded when she signed something.

When her story made a splash in the Turkish media a few months ago, it was yet another embarrassment for a political establishment that constantly promises to clean up the country's human-rights record, but always seems to fall short.

A year ago, after decades of struggling to gain acceptance at the European table, Turkey was formally confirmed as a candidate for membership in the European Union. Many expected that this milestone would finally mark a turning point in Turkey's effort to reform.

Those expectations have gone largely unfulfilled.

"The Turkish government made almost no progress on key human-rights reforms in 2000," according to Human Rights Watch's recently released annual report.

"While the government procrastinated, politicians and writers were prosecuted and imprisoned for expressing their non-violent opinions, and detainees in police custody remained at risk of ill-treatment, torture or death," the report said.

This week 17 inmates and two guards were killed in clashes that erupted in Turkish prisons, prompting a warning from the EU that the government's tactics were once again calling into question its commitment to human rights.

According to Eren Keskin, a human-rights lawyer who has taken on Ince's case, "Torture is a state policy and continues to be used systematically. All thinking apart from official thinking is a crime."

Ince's crime, according to court documents, was belonging to a terrorist organization, the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party, known as the PKK. The state prosecutor asked for the death sentence. Ince, who was 14 at the time, said she was only looking for her missing sister.

On a recent afternoon, Ince and another woman, also a victim of torture, met in a chilly Istanbul office and told their stories.

Ince told of how her parents, her nine brothers and a sister moved to Istanbul in 1988 to escape the civil war in Turkey's southeast. In the spring of 1996, her 16-year-old sister Alyie disappeared, not an uncommon occurrence in Turkey where rights groups have documented the disappearances of hundreds of people while in police custody.

Authorities suggested that perhaps the missing sister had gone into the hills with the PKK, so Ince took a bus back to the family's village in the southeast to learn what she could.

In Bingol, a former PKK stronghold, she made contact with some guerrillas who said they had no information but allowed Ince to stay with them while they made further inquiries.

Five days later, Ince was sent to bring water back to the PKK's hideout when she stumbled into an army ambush. She sustained bullet and shrapnel wounds to her chest, arms, shoulders, buttocks and feet.

It seemed likely that she would die, but when she didn't, she was transferred to a prison where she was repeatedly tortured.

For the first 33 days of her imprisonment, Ince said that she was not allowed to wear clothing, even in the presence of male prisoners.

"I wasn't raped, but there was always sexual harassment. They were always threatening to rape me," she said.

She was suspended upside down and dropped on her head. She was suspended right-side up with her arms tied behind her in a device known as a "Palestinian hanger."

She was sprayed with water from a high-pressure hose and jolted with electricity. She was beaten so severely that her leg was broken. Her wounds were salted.

Ince was released from prison last June on medical grounds after international human-rights organizations took up her case, but the charges against her still stand.

Kamile Gigci, a 45-year-old mother of five from the southeastern town of Nusaybin, was the other woman who told her story. She is a pastrymaker suspected of having Kurdish sympathies. It seems she may have had some close relatives in the PKK.

She too experienced the Palestinian hanger and being dropped on her head. She said that over the course of several visits to the Nusaybin police station, she was raped repeatedly and subjected to other forms of sexual torture.

"They said to me, `If you give us the name of one person, we will set you free,'" she said.

The pattern of torture in Turkey has become numbingly familiar. A group of Norwegian lawyers recently documented the cases of 113 women who were tortured and sexually assaulted while in police custody in Turkey.

In her Ankara office, Sema Piskinsut displays a collection of Palestinian hangers and other torture devices that she has confiscated from Turkish police stations and prisons during spot checks over the last three years. Until recently, she was head of the Turkish parliament's human-rights commission.